Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

Instapaper is an application aimed at time-shifting the consumption of online content, including journalism. It was launched in 2008 by developer Marco Arment, who at the time was the lead developer of Tumblr, and was bought in 2013 by Betaworks.

Instapaper allows users to click a bookmarklet whenever they come across an article they would like to read later; typical candidates include long magazine articles. Once clicked, the article is stripped of ads and clutter, saved on Instapaper’s servers, and made available for offline reading in Instapaper’s iPhone and iPad apps. Instapaper also connects to Amazon’s Kindle.

Instapaper and its ilk have encouraged some news organizations to experiment with less cluttered reading environments, although they have also been controversial for some because of their extraction of content from its surrounding advertisements. Readability, in response, has created a program for publishers that pays them a small amount when their articles are read within the service.

Pocket shows the power of data in picking stories — One of my hobby horses (I’ve got a few) is that news organizations aren’t doing enough to personalize the stories they present to users. The largest news companies produce a ton of content every day; individu...

Patch is a network of local news sites with a combination of staff-produced and community-contributed material. It is owned by Hale Global, with former owner AOL retaining a small stake. The company, which focuses exclusively on local news, began with a handful of sites in New Jersey and Connecticut and is now in about 900 communities. It…

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